China's Hidden Army of Workers Strives to Adapt

By PATRICK E. TYLER,

Published: December 11, 1994

MIANYANG, China—
Fearing nuclear attack from either the United States or the Soviet Union, China in the mid-1960's undertook what was perhaps the largest industrial relocation in history to protect its strategic factories.

Now, more than 20 years after World War III failed to occur as Mao Zedong had predicted, some of the country's top scientists and engineers are still trickling down from production lines in remote mountains and caves to gleaming cities like this one in south-central China.

They are designing television sets, fax machines, satellite receivers and, perhaps, the battery system for the next electric car. Here, they are setting up new factories and sending delegations to New York seeking investment capital for high-technology ventures, They hope to find a market for the talent and the skills they mortgaged for so long to Mao's apocalyptic vision under a policy that relocated hundreds of important industries in the 1960's and 1970's to remote canyons and caves in northwestern and southwestern China.

"You know, there are many things in common with the manufacture of bombs and in the manufacture of automobiles," said Zhu Senyuan, 48, a computer automation specialist at a military institute now helping 600 factories across China convert armaments lines to commercial production.

But many of the strategic factories are old or redundant and, despite their relocation to cities on the plains, they are far from potential markets at a time when China is trying to reform its economy.

The cost of the top-secret program was staggering. Barry Naughton, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, has estimated that during the peak years China was spending 40 to 50 percent of its national investment resources under the so-called Third Line policy, and that it had sent hundreds of thousands of workers to the mountains where they functioned as "human wave" construction brigades to chisel caverns, tunnel for railroads, transport machinery and build assembly lines in remote and forbidding landscapes.

"It very substantially slowed down China's economic growth and on some levels contributed to the collapse of central planning," said Mr. Naughton, a specialist on China's economy who has conducted one of the few studies on the Third Line and its impact.

Beijing's central planners "got so tangled up in directing resources to these remote sites that they never could complete these projects or make them economically viable," he said during a recent visit to China.

By the time the Third Line was completed, Mao had died and it stood as another monument to his willpower over the Chinese.

"The decision by Mao to build the Third Line was a big mistake," said Hua Di, a rocket scientist who spent months living in Third Line bases testing China's first strategic nuclear missiles and who now lives in California. "We have wasted a lot of money by building this Third Line," which, he added, gave China little additional security.

"If you have a rocket program and a bomb or missile falls on just one of the many component factories, then you have no program," Mr. Hua said. "But the leaders were ignorant of this aspect of modern technology."

In its heyday, planners of the Third Line ordered steel mills, nuclear weapons plants and huge truck assembly lines, first built in coastal provinces or near borders with the Soviet Union, disassembled and transported over treacherous mountain roads or paths to what Mao thought would be an impregnable "rear base," or "third line of defense" to sustain a Chinese war effort. The "first" line was China's coastal defenses and the "second" line was a fall-back position on the central China plain.

To build the Third Line, railways were ripped up in some populous provinces to build new links through unpopulated hinterlands.

The consequences of the program are still radiating into the present because the construction was so large in scale and took so long, 15 years in some cases, leaving China with an uneconomical and inefficient industrial architecture. Today, the plants are still being dismantled, abandoned or turned to other uses.

"There is a major investment in this region," said Chen Zhixiang, deputy director of the Mianyang economic and planning commission, "but the problem is that the investment is spread out through canyons some distance from the city. Our production and research bases are located in the mountains and accessible only over very difficult roads."

Even Mianyang is difficult to reach. It can take four hours to travel the 60 miles of winding two-lane road from Chengdu, the provincial capital.

Somewhere amid the peaks and crags that are visible from these clean streets is China's largest wind tunnel. It is too big to relocate, so aerodynamic engineers from all over the country must come here with their aircraft or rocket models to carry out large-scale tests.

One canyon holds a nuclear reactor for making plutonium for nuclear weapons, another an electron accelerator for high-energy physics experiments and yet another a large radar works. To the east is a rocket body factory and the entire spectrum of electronics industries, many of which have transferred part of their production here.